The Stain

The old man’s daughter made inquiries in the village, looking for someone to go there every weekday and keep an eye on him, to clean the place and cook something for his lunch and tea. He wasn’t incapacitated, but he wasn’t used to looking after himself. Marina needed the money. So every morning, after she dropped Liam off at school, she made her way up through the churchyard and across the park to the square stone house on the corner where the old man lived. Rooks squawked, scattered out of the beech trees by the wind; unkempt grass blew around the molehills; swallows were dark scratches on the light. Marina was tall and athletic-looking, in black leggings and trainers and a pink puffa jacket, with a freckled face and a ponytail of tangled curling auburn hair. She walked with a long stride, swinging her shopping bag, bent forward, as if she were oblivious or shy, although she was well known in the village. She’d had plenty of little jobs doing housework, and had worked in the dry cleaner’s before she was married. Reliable and thoughtful, an oddball who kept herself apart from the other mothers, she was just the right choice for handling a difficult old man.

She told him that she had been looking at this house all her life—she’d passed it every day when she was a child herself, walking to school—but she’d never been inside before. She didn’t volunteer this right away; she waited first to see whether he wanted her to talk. Her husband, Gary, had warned her that the old man and his daughter would be used to having black servants waiting on them hand and foot, but it wasn’t really like that. Wendy had left South Africa and come to live in England before Marina was even born, and she said that she never wanted to go back—there was so much violence there now. And the old man didn’t seem to be any kind of slave driver. He liked to sit and watch Marina work sometimes, but he always asked her courteously first whether she minded.

“So what d’you think of the house, now you’re inside it?” he asked.

“You’ve got a nice lot of space,” she said, sitting back on her haunches, wiping her hot face on her arm. She was scouring the linoleum on the kitchen floor, on her hands and knees with a scrubbing brush and a bucket, because of the stubborn greasy dirt. She told him that you could fit her whole house in his drawing room. When she was a child, this house from the outside, with its tall façade and many blind-looking windows, had seemed to stand for all the grandeur and beauty she could imagine. In reality, inside it was dingy and half-furnished and needed a coat of paint. The kitchen and the bathrooms hadn’t been altered in thirty years; in the kitchen she had to manage with a single stainless-steel sink and no dishwasher. The previous owners had left some furniture in the upstairs rooms, but the upholstery was worn and grubby; the old man hadn’t brought much from South Africa. They had plenty of money: Wendy’s own place was as luxurious inside as pictures in a magazine. It was the old man’s choice, his obstinacy, to live in the house without renovating it.

He missed the sun, sitting with a blanket over his knees even in warm weather. Although he was eighty-nine, he didn’t look that old. He was thickset with broad shoulders, his white hair sprouting up stiffly, his small eyes, lost under baggy eyelids, set far back above his flattened cheekbones. His face was expressive and ravaged, like an actor’s. Marina imagined how hard it was for a man who must once have been so vigorous to accept this diminished life, using a cane to get around, with no one to command except her. He’d had to give up driving because of his glaucoma; anyway, he had no friends to visit in this country, apart from his daughter. Because he talked about the vines he’d tended in South Africa, and because he was so deeply tanned, his skin like tough yellow leather, Marina thought he must have been a farmer and spent his days outdoors.

The vacuum cleaner died on Marina one morning while she was doing the stairs, and he told her to bring it to where he was sitting, in the room he called the office, poring over bank statements and bills. (He had business interests, he told her, though he wasn’t a businessman.) He took the thing to pieces with a screwdriver on top of the desk, painstakingly, with trembling fingers, peering at it through his magnifying glass. When he was concentrating, he stuck out the tip of his tongue at one corner of his mouth, just as Liam did. He got the vacuum going again and that cheered him up. Marina noticed that at lunch that day he ate more hungrily. He said that he liked meat, meat more than anything, and he complimented her gravy (everybody liked her gravy), but usually he managed only a few mouthfuls, pushing whatever vegetables she’d cooked for him to one side of the plate. She had to tuck a napkin under his chin, to keep him from dropping food on his shirtfront.

The next day, she brought an Airfix model in her shopping bag, a Spitfire that someone had given Liam for Christmas; it was too difficult for Liam, and she wondered if the old man would enjoy putting it together. She worried that she was overstepping the mark, insulting him with a child’s toy, but he seemed pleased; he told her that he’d had a pilot’s license for years, flying small planes. His hands weren’t steady enough, though, to control the tiny pieces of the model—you needed tweezers to put the pilot and the propellers in place, and the glue got everywhere, the pieces stuck to his fingers. Marina had to help him paint it, and put the stickers on, according to the instructions. He was discouraged and disappointed in himself; he blamed his eyes.

“You could write your memoirs,” she suggested. “That’s what my grandpa did, because he was in the war. He dictated them into a recorder, and my auntie typed them up. You could pay someone to do it.”

The old man laughed sourly, tapping his forehead. “Better not. Better to keep it all in here where it’s safe.”

She got him to talk about the weather in South Africa, the landscape and the wild animals. He said that the fruit and vegetables over here tasted of nothing, so she picked peas and broad beans from his own vegetable patch, which Wendy tended, and got him to shell them for her, sitting in his garden, saucepan on his lap, colander at his side for the empty pods. If you asked him in the right way, as though you needed his help, then he didn’t mind being put to work. When he’d shelled them himself, he would sometimes eat them with his lunch.

She saw that he was depressed because he was bored. She could tell as soon as she arrived in the morning if he was in a mood. He sulked; he pretended not to hear her come in the back door, calling out to him; he knocked things over deliberately; he snarled into the phone. (He was always on the telephone, fussing over his investments.) When he was pleased with himself, he was emotional, jovial. He snatched Marina’s hand and squeezed it, said that she was like another daughter to him. There were real tears in his eyes. He wanted to know all about Gary and Liam and her parents and her childhood. He liked to hear the story of her walking past his house when she was a girl. “I wish I’d lived here then,” he said. “I’d have invited you inside. You could have played in the garden.”

But once he pushed her hand away in irritation when she brought him a cup of hot coffee, so that it spilled all down her front, and then he was in an agony of contrition—he tried to get down on his knees to ask forgiveness. “Don’t be so silly,” Marina said calmly. “I’m not scalded. And it’s only an old apron.”

“Can I buy you a new washing machine?” he said. “I mean for your own home. To make up for it. I’m a horrible old man.”

She laughed. “Listen to you. What are you on about? I’ve got a perfectly good washing machine.”

Wendy called at the house most days, in her four-by-four with tinted windows and the two dogs in the back—to drop off her father’s shopping, or to work in his garden, or take him to his medical appointments (he had prostate problems and diabetes). She wasn’t known for her tact; she was always managing to upset the women who worked for her in her fancy gift shop (which was only a hobby—her divorce had left her with more than enough money). But Marina didn’t take offense when Wendy tried ordering her around, finding fault. Wendy was a dumpy little woman, nervous and punctilious, with the same wide-apart eyes and flattened cheekbones as the old man, her hair dyed black and cut in a shape like a pixie’s cap. Apparently, she had a wardrobe full of beautiful clothes that she couldn’t get into anymore. You could hardly hear her South African accent, though you could cut her father’s with a knife.

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After all those years apart, father and daughter were almost strangers to each other; Wendy was embarrassed if he had to lean on her for support when they went out together, for drinks or to a concert in the village. He was forceful and charming, and made a point of winning over Wendy’s friends, but in his company she was awkward. She knew how to show affection only to her dogs. She’d wanted her father to come over, but now that she’d got him here she didn’t know what to do with him. People said that there was a brother still in South Africa, but the family had lost contact with him; he’d had mental-health problems, or he’d spent time in prison for cheating pensioners out of their money.

Marina was settling in at the big house. When she went up to dust the bedrooms on the second floor, which were never used, she liked to stand dreaming, looking down from the windows on her old life in the street below. She persuaded the old man to come to church with her on Sundays. And she took Liam to play in the garden after school, thinking that it would be good for the old man. He’d hardly known his grandchildren, Wendy’s three sons, when they were small, and they didn’t seem eager to make contact with him now. One was an architect and one was in banking; Anthony, the youngest, still lived at home, and was supposed to be setting up some sort of business on the Internet. Glancing out from the kitchen, where she was fixing something that the old man could heat up for his supper later, Marina saw his white head and the boy’s round fair head bent intently over something or other that Liam had dug up out of the earth—a snail shell or a broken bit of china. The flame of her love for her child lapped for that moment around the lonely old man, too: the baggy, age-spotted hands cupped around the child’s tiny, unspoiled, tender ones.

Wendy came into the kitchen with a basket full of courgettes and lettuce, wanting to wash her hands in the sink, clicking her tongue impatiently when it was full of peelings. Holding her hands under the running water, she stared out the window at her father playing with Liam. “He was never like that with us,” she said, not as if she were complaining, just passing on information. Sometimes when she’d been working in the garden her usual stiffness unwound. “He’s growing garrulous in his old age. Child-friendly. Religious. What a turnup.”

“You grew up on a farm, didn’t you?”

“Is that what he told you?”

“He talked about growing things.”

“There was a farm in the Cape. It was my grandparents’, but we always kept it up. And Dad made a go of it again after he retired. Just something to keep him busy.”

Mostly Wendy kept herself carefully closed off from Marina, behind a preoccupied, worldly surface, always hurrying somewhere, flashing her car keys about like an insignia. In the back of the four-by-four, along with the dogs, there were boxes full of the retro stuff she sold for so much money in her shop: enamel watering cans artfully rusted, worn old trowels tied up with hairy twine, bits of slate to use as plant labels, rickety iron garden chairs, carbolic soap. These were for people who played at gardening, Marina thought. But Wendy herself was an expert, gifted gardener. As well as growing vegetables in her father’s garden, she was clearing the little paths edged with lavender around an old sundial, and replanting the herbaceous border in front of the yew hedge with delphinium, verbascum, and phlox.

In church, Marina only half listened to the words of the service; she went into a kind of trance. She sometimes thought she might fall asleep while she had her head in her hands and was meant to be praying. The important thing was her immersion in the subdued light and the pocket of damp, different air inside the church walls. Afterward, she and Liam walked the old man back across the park; he leaned on her, stumbling on the tussocky grass, making her feel his dead weight. His force hadn’t drained away altogether, but it was uncoördinated, outside his control. He wore dark glasses in the sunshine to protect his eyes. At the house, she would pour him a brandy and settle him to wait for Wendy, who came to fetch him for Sunday lunch. He didn’t want the television on—he said he couldn’t see it, didn’t care for it anyway.

“Watch out for him,” Gary said. “Old men get some funny ideas.”

But nothing ever happened that was wrong. He kissed her on the cheek with his wet mouth every day when she arrived and when she left; if he got the chance he tried to put his arm around her shoulders or her waist. Once or twice he touched her legs, not lewdly, but she reproached him and he was abashed; he retreated into gloom, wouldn’t speak for hours. Marina didn’t tell Gary about any of this. She thought how hard it must be, at the end of your life, to be deprived forever of physical contact. Her own body felt luxuriantly wrapped in touching—Gary’s and Liam’s. She hardly knew where her body stopped and her little boy’s started. Couldn’t she spare the old man a little out of her surplus?

“I’m sorry for him,” she said to Gary. “And the money’s useful.”

Gary worked for his brother, who laid patios and garden paths, but there wasn’t much business; people were cutting back in the recession. Marina didn’t tell him, either, that the old man put extra money in the envelope he gave her every week, crushing it clumsily into her pocket or into the bib of her apron while she was rolling out plain scones on the kitchen table. Every week, once she’d washed and dried her hands and counted the money, she took out the extra and gave it firmly back to him, so that there could be no mistake. She knew where to draw the line.

“Please take it,” he said, pushing it at her. “There’s plenty more where that came from. Make me happy by taking it. What do I want with it now, at my age, in this condition? I want to give it to your family.”

“These are just dreams,” she said. “They’re nonsense. You don’t know us.”

“You’re good people, I know you are. I watch you. I want to help your husband out, let him start up a little business of his own. I want to set up a trust fund, so that your boy can go to a decent school.”

“To give something like that to someone, you have to be a relative. Or you have to have known them all your life, through thick and thin. This story you’ve dreamed up about us isn’t real. You haven’t even met my husband.”

“It’s you who doesn’t know about the real world,” he said impatiently. “Money changes things, if you’ve got it. You can change anything.”

“I don’t want change, then.”

“I don’t believe you.”

Sometimes after church he persuaded her to have a drop of brandy with him in the drawing room while he waited for Wendy. It was sweet, and not harsh, as she’d expected; she rarely drank alcohol, so it went straight to her head. Liam would be playing in the garden. Because of the brandy, when she looked out the window she seemed to be looking down on him from a great distance, at his bare knees and bent head as he crouched, stroking the neighbors’ tabby. She could hear the coaxing, chirruping noises he was making. The drawing room ran right through the house—it had sash windows at front and back. She loved the way the light sprang across from one wall to the other, as if in a conversation.

The old man told her that all his life he’d thought only about his career and not enough about his family; he’d forgotten the religion he’d believed in when he was a boy. He said that after his wife died he’d gone off the rails—he’d been with all kinds of women, he’d paid for prostitutes. Would God forgive him? Marina stopped him. She said that it wasn’t right for her to know those things if his own daughter didn’t.

“Could I tell her?” he barked, in an outbreak of rough contempt.

All the time Marina kept him safe, at arm’s length, putting him off gently, smiling, laughing. But he told her nonetheless that she was a beautiful and graceful young woman. (Those weren’t words that Gary ever would have used.) She was ashamed of feeling secretly gratified. She said that he had to stop talking such rubbish. He told her about his travels all over Africa. He’d been to Singapore and Cairo and Australia and California. Marina knew that she was unsophisticated, that her life must seem tame and timid to him. Sometimes it seemed timid to her; she chafed against its limits. The old man held something back, some knowledge or intimation, which made her life seem shallow by comparison—even if he was cantankerous and shaky on his legs, with his cavernous stale mouth and brown teeth.

Then he wanted to give her the house. The story went around the village as a half-secret. Ten bedrooms, Queen Anne, Grade II-listed; it needed work, but had to be worth a million at least, even in the current market. Properties at the top of the ladder hadn’t lost much. The women in the shop looked at Wendy to see how she was taking it: she’d brought her father all the way over here to be with her, and now he was giving away her inheritance to the cleaning lady. (Though there was probably plenty more, apart from the house. He’d been putting money into a British bank account for years.)

Marina knew what everyone was thinking. Of course she couldn’t take the house. What would they do, in any case—her and Gary and Liam—with all those rooms? The maintenance of those old places cost a fortune in itself; it would fall down around their ears. It was the old man’s fantasy—she never seriously considered it. He begged her to accept, and she refused. Then he told Wendy that he was leaving it to Marina anyway. There was a big confrontation; Wendy accused the pair of them of scheming behind her back. Marina, in tears, gave in her notice.

That evening, Wendy telephoned to apologize. “I shouldn’t have lost my temper,” she said. “We’re both distraught at having upset you. I’d be so grateful if you’d give us another try. It would be difficult for us to find anyone else. My father’s not an easy man, and he’s grown very fond of you.”

“But you’ll always think I’m after his money,” Marina said.

Wendy recoiled at her bluntness, she could hear. (She had blenched once when Marina brought an armful of dirty sheets into the kitchen after the old man had had an accident in his bed.) “I’m sure it was all his idea,” she offered with chilly neutrality. “I know what my father’s like, once he fixes on something.”

“I’ll go back if he stops trying to give me stuff.”

“He says he’s sorry. It won’t happen again.”

So Marina resumed making her way each morning, after she’d dropped Liam off at school, under the soughing, agitated trees in the churchyard and across the park—head down as usual, her long scissoring stride like a wading bird’s—to spend all day alone with the old man. Wendy offered her a raise, and she accepted it; Gary had always said that she ought to be paid better for the work she did, more like a full-time caregiver than a cleaner. (And, after all that, the extra was only deducted from her working tax credit.)

For a while, after their row, the old man treated Marina as if she were made of glass, putting on a meek, modestly inquiring voice that wasn’t really his, asking for a gin-and-tonic before his lunch but “only if she had time.” This was nonsense and they both knew it, were relieved when he fell back into his usual peremptory intimacy. At least he’d stopped giving her presents. Yet, in some magical way, Marina did now succumb to the idea that the old house was hers—not forever but for the moment. She was getting to know it now that she had gone into every corner of it, scouring out the gritty dust and cobwebs and curled-up balls of dead wood lice, bleaching and disinfecting. She had even grown not to mind the faded furniture and the empty rooms, the staring rectangles on the wallpaper, where the previous owners had taken down their paintings. She cut flowers in the garden and arranged them in vases that she found in a cupboard under the stairs.

She put out a linen napkin in a silver ring for the old man’s lunch.

“Won’t you sit with me?” he asked her humbly.

The food that Wendy brought him was too rich, cooked in olive oil or with cream sauces; he couldn’t always keep it down. Marina made plain food, and she cut the meat into little pieces for him, easy to chew and swallow. He got angry with his broken body, how it betrayed him. She rested her hand consolingly on his shoulder while he ate. She knew that she was a good nurse; her hands were good. She had looked after her own father in his last illness.

For the old man’s ninetieth-birthday party, Wendy built a barbecue out of bricks, in a little paved area by one corner of the wall at the end of the garden. She told Marina that when she was a child she and her brother had spent every summer on their farm in the Western Cape, cooking most of their food outdoors on a braai or in a metal potjie, which sat over the fire. The old man was pleased with the idea of a party; it gave him something to look forward to. On the telephone, he ordered crates of his favorite Groot Constantia wine.

His birthday was at the end of September and the sky was cloudless. Guests—mostly friends of Wendy’s—came strolling across the grass from where they had parked beside the church. The vicar came, with the next-door neighbors, and Anthony and another of Wendy’s sons, who brought his wife. Anthony and his brother took charge of grilling the meat, entering into the role with a lot of teasing banter, deferring to their grandfather’s expertise. They were good-looking young men, casually but expensively dressed, aware of conferring the favor of their youth on the elderly party. Marina had spoken to Anthony once or twice when he came to the house with Wendy; she’d never met the other one before. The old man had insisted that she bring Gary and Liam, though Gary was reluctant, sure he’d have nothing to say to these kinds of people. She had persuaded him to come for just an hour. At least he had Liam to look after; his responsibility for his son gave him something to do in a crowd and made him more confident.

The guests gathered closer together, as the light went, around the barbecue’s radiant heat. Gary enjoyed himself after all. The old man made a fuss of him, filling up his glass; he wasn’t used to drinking wine and it helped him talk more easily, mostly about the local fishing. As if she were in a conspiracy with the old man, Marina noticed how cleverly he charmed her husband—while Liam, the only child at the party, ran in the dusk around the winding garden paths, lost in his own world. When Marina went into the kitchen to wash up, Wendy followed her, protesting theatrically that she could take it all home to put in her dishwasher. Wendy had been drinking, too; in company, her manner was jokey, almost flirtatious. She must have been pleased at having her handsome sons on display. She thanked Marina emotionally for everything she’d done for the old man, said she thought her dad was having a great day. Drying up the plates and cutlery and putting them away, Marina was relieved that the tension between her and Wendy seemed to be resolved; she covered the leftover food with cling film, restored order in the quiet kitchen. Gary took Liam home to put him to bed; she said she’d follow them soon. Voices floated subduedly through the open window. She knew the pattern of her movements in that kitchen by heart—her hand found its way in the shadows to each cupboard door or drawer. Tightening the taps, she wrung out the dishcloth and hung it across the drainer.

She would have liked to slip away invisibly, but the old man called her over as she stepped out of the back door. (They never used the grand front door, which opened onto the street.) She was surprised that he could even see her through his dark glasses, from the far end of the garden; he had seemed sunk in sleep, hunched silent in his chair with a shawl over his shoulders as the others talked. Only his family were left around the barbecue. Wendy’s daughter-in-law, Jasmine, was yawning and shivering in her skimpy dress. Half standing up, the old man fumbled for Marina’s hand and kissed it.

“Where have you been hiding away from me?”

Everyone laughed. His words were slurring. She thought he’d had enough of the party and was probably ready for bed. “Have you met Marina, Jasmine? She’s my treasure.”

Wendy chimed in. “We are very lucky to have Marina.”

The old man wanted belatedly to make a speech. “I’ve been so fortunate to be surrounded with love in my old age, in a strange country where I didn’t look for it. Marina doesn’t know her own goodness. People like her and her family, they hold it all together for the rest of us, in their spirit. Some of us have had lives with every advantage, but we don’t deserve to kiss the hem of her garment.”

Marina was embarrassed, and jarred by some false, sentimental note in his performance, which seemed aimed challengingly at his family. She pulled her hand away quickly. Anthony offered her a lift; he said he wanted an excuse to try out his brother’s Audi, but she insisted that she preferred to walk—it would take her only ten minutes. It was a relief to be out on the street alone. The high heels she’d worn for the party clicked and scraped too assertively on the pavement, so she bent and eased them off, then walked barefoot, carrying her shoes with the straps looped over her finger. She should have brought her trainers to change into. There was no one around, but a car came up behind her as she turned into the road off the high street which led to the little estate of ex-council houses where she lived. There was no pavement here, so she stood back for the car to pass. Instead, it drew up alongside her, sleek and low-slung, engine thrumming fluently. Anthony leaned across to push open the passenger door, his white shirt gleaming in the light from the instrument panel.

“Get in,” he said. “I’m driving it back to Mum’s. I’ll drop you off.”

“Really, I like the walk,” Marina protested. “Gets my head clear.”

But he wouldn’t take no for an answer. When she moved on, he followed at her speed, nosing the car along in stops and starts, revving the engine persuasively. She felt its hot breath on her bare legs. Anthony opened the door again. “Come on. Hop in.”

Exasperated, conscious that people must be listening behind all the windows in the street, she got in. Despite the fine night, Anthony had the air-conditioning on, and in the sealed, cold atmosphere the smell of the leather upholstery was strong. “Nice motor, isn’t it?” he said. He dropped his glance briefly from the road, noticing her feet. “You funny thing. You’ve taken your shoes off.”

“Can’t walk quick in my heels.”

He was amused. “But don’t you mind getting your feet dirty?”

“Take the left here at the fork. Then it’s the first right.”

“I know where you live. But we’re going the long way round. I want to have a little talk with you.”

Marina was furious with herself for having accepted the lift against her better judgment. “Don’t be silly, Anthony. I’m tired and I want to get home.”

She rattled the handle of the car door, but Anthony seemed to have locked it by pressing something on his side; he put his foot down on the accelerator. They left the last houses of the village behind and were quickly onto the country road, where the car’s headlights tunnelled into the darkness under the trees. Marina wasn’t frightened—she was too full of outrage, folding her arms tightly around her bag and pressing it to her chest. How dare he carry her off as if she didn’t count? They were probably more or less the same age, she and this boy, but she felt herself immeasurably older than he was. She had a child of her own, whereas he still lived like a child in his mother’s house; Wendy complained that he left his dirty clothes on the floor for her to pick up. Yet somehow Anthony undermined her with self-doubt—his fresh, plump face unmarked by trouble and his voice so blandly assured.

“Please take me back,” she said as calmly as she could, and Anthony assured her that he’d turn around as soon as he had the chance. About a quarter of a mile up the road, he steered the Audi into a lay-by where tourists sometimes parked their cars to walk the forest trails. Marina struggled again with the door.

“Let me out here,” she insisted. “I want to walk back.”

He reached across her to unlock the door. Shrinking back inside her seat belt, she was smothered for a moment in the warm cotton smell of his shirt, perfumed with cologne and barbecue smoke. He laughed at her. “Don’t worry. I haven’t got any designs on your virtue. I’ll drive you home in a moment, or you can walk in your bare feet if you prefer it. Like I said, I just want to talk to you about something. I want to warn you about my grandfather, that’s all. For your own good. He’s got a big crush on you, he wants to give you presents—and why shouldn’t he? But I thought you ought to know a bit more about him before you make up your mind whether to accept them.”

He pushed the car door wide open and they listened to the muted, tickling noises the engine made as it cooled. “I don’t even want his presents,” Marina said. “Your mother knows that. I don’t even take them.”

“Well, just in case.”

And he told her what the old man had been involved in, in the seventies and eighties, working in special operations for the South African Defense Force. “The details are pretty murky,” Anthony said. “A lot of accusations were flying around.” Somehow the old man had got away with an amnesty—perhaps because he was already in his late sixties by then, retired to his farm. “I don’t condemn him. I don’t think you can condemn anything, unless you were there. Mum said there was no point in telling you—it’s all old history now. He’s just a sad old man. But I thought that you might like to know, that’s all.”

She meant to look it up on the Internet when she got home (Anthony had said that some of the stories were there if you searched for his grandfather’s name), but she didn’t. She lay in bed beside Gary, who was sound asleep, and eventually she fell asleep herself. By the time she woke, Gary was moving around in the kitchen downstairs, putting the kettle on for tea and preparing Liam’s breakfast. Through the floor, she could hear Liam’s questions and Gary’s low-voiced responses—not so much answers as reassurances of his steady presence.

Marina felt burdened, as if she’d woken from a clinging, unpleasant dream. Once, when she was a girl, walking with Gary in the woods, they’d come across something inexplicable and horrible—the rotting head of some creature caught in the cleft branch of a tree, a chain of vertebrae dangling below it. Because the vertebrae looked like a long neck, she’d thought at first that it must be a goose or a swan that had got trapped somehow; then she saw teeth, and tufts of gristly fur stuck to the skull. Gary had poked at it with a stick. It was a mammal, perhaps a big stoat; Gary could only think that it must have been dropped from the sky by a bird of prey, the flesh falling away from the backbone as it decayed. Marina had looked at the thing coolly, but then as she walked on its reality had taken up residence inside her. There was no violent shock, only a settled change, and the realization—a surprise—that you couldn’t undo the knowledge of the thing with the same calm ease with which you had taken it in. And for a while afterward everything she looked at had seemed unclean, had revealed a leering, repulsive side she’d never seen before. She thought with distaste now of the old man’s soiled linen soaking in a bucket.

She couldn’t forgive herself for her innocence, which seemed willful in retrospect; she remembered how the old man had courted and flattered her. As soon as she’d heard the things that Anthony listed, she had no doubt that some of them were true—enough of them for it not to matter which. They must have been written on the old man’s surface, she thought, but she’d been too ignorant to read them. Gary asked wasn’t she going to work today? Marina didn’t want to, but she didn’t want to explain to Gary, either, so she dressed and took Liam to school, then went into the churchyard. Clouds blew across the patchy sunshine. A new grave was littered with dead flowers still wrapped in cellophane, sodden ribbons, a child’s paper windmill. Already the old man would be missing her. He was probably telephoning right now, to find out where she was. She kept her mobile switched off. Should she go up to the house? Was that her duty? She had thought she might go into the church to pray for guidance, but as soon as she sat down in the churchyard that idea sickened her, too, as another fake.

Instead, she set out for Wendy’s, wanting to talk to her. It was along the way that Anthony had driven the night before; less than ten minutes by car, but quite a walk. Wendy’s house, rectangular and substantial, newly painted cream, was set back from the road; when Marina was halfway up the gravelled drive she caught sight of Wendy standing at one of the upstairs windows as if she were looking out for her, expecting her. Wendy waved urgently; moments later, she appeared at the front door in a white towelling bathrobe and flip-flops, her hair scraped back from her forehead under a stretch band. She hurried up to Marina, seizing her hands. Naked of its makeup, greasy with cleanser, her face looked dazzled and bewildered.

“Is he gone?”

“I don’t know,” Marina said, thinking she must mean Anthony.

“What’s extraordinary,” Wendy hurried on, not in her usual mocking, drawling voice but exalted and excited, “is that I’ve always dreamed of it happening just like this. In the dream, it’s always morning and overcast, I’m running a bath in the en suite and I get undressed, the tap’s still running, everything’s steamy. Then in the dream I get this premonition that it’s going to happen, right now—and that’s when the phone rings and it’s my useless brother, ringing to tell me that Dad’s dead. But the dream’s changed since Dad came to live here. Now it’s always you instead, bringing the news. You’re always coming up the drive, wearing your pink jacket—I see your red hair. While I was running my bath this morning, I looked out and saw you, and it was exactly like it was in the dream, so I just knew.”

Marina calmed her down and explained that she hadn’t seen the old man yet this morning, that as far as she knew he was fine. Although Wendy seemed to listen, she was still agitated. She asked Marina to wait while she dressed. Then they drove down into the village together, to check on him. Wendy never asked why Marina had come to see her, and her explanation was overtaken by events. The old man had died peacefully in his sleep. Almost peacefully. There was some evidence of a struggle with the bedclothes. He had fallen halfway out of the bed when they found him, with his head on the floor.

He did leave Marina the house in his will—he’d changed it only a few weeks before his death—but she wouldn’t take it. The solicitors said that her refusal was unusual but not unprecedented; she had to sign a disclaimer in order to give the house back. Eventually, Wendy got builders into it, renovating from top to bottom, doing it up beautifully. Then she moved in herself and put her other place on the market. She tried to give Marina some money instead of the house, but Marina wouldn’t touch a penny. It caused trouble between her and Gary. Gary didn’t see why she shouldn’t have something, and Marina’s mother agreed: they could put it aside, in case Liam wanted to go to college later. But once Marina got an idea into her head there was no changing it. Gary knew that better than anyone. In the end, he went along with what she wanted. ♦

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